📘 This article explains creating SmartLink optimizations to improve your internal linking. SmartLink is part of Botify's Activation Suite, available as an option with all Botify plans.
Overview
SmartLink optimizations generate a file of recommended links that Botify can deploy, or you can deploy on your own. Creating SmartLink optimizations includes the following steps:
Identifying the Optimization
Navigate to Activation > SmartLink > Create optimization.
Choose the type of page to optimize: detail pages (e.g., product, blog post) or listing pages (e.g., product category, search results).
Name the optimization to identify it easily on the SmartLink Overview page.
Select the Botify crawl for SmartLink to base the recommendations on. SmartLink will generate link recommendations using the SEO performance data collected in this crawl combined with your third-party data and automation. The most recent crawl is selected by default, which you should use unless there was an issue in that crawl (e.g., it was incomplete).
Selecting the Method for Identifying Pages to Optimize
To define the pages to be evaluated to receive links, choose either Botify’s recommendations or your file with the URLs you want to optimize.
👉 Selecting pages to optimize does not guarantee that all URLs matching the filters will be optimized. Some pages may be ineligible based on filter limits or insufficient sources.
Recommended Destinations
With this option, Botify applies two default filters, and you can optionally add filters to refine the list of URLs to be optimized (e.g., No. of Inlinks < 50). The default filters ensure you are only optimizing indexable pages and only the first listing or detail page. When you select this option, a sample of 10 URLs displays to show an example of results with the applied filters.
Upload Destinations
Choose this option when you know which URLs you want to optimize.
To use this option:
Click the Download template link to access the template.
Add the URLs to be optimized to the template, then save the .CSV file without changing its format.
Click Upload .CSV file to share the URLs with SmartLink.
Defining Link Rules
To define the rules to be applied to SmartLink generation:
Select the maximum number of links to add to each source page. These are the pages sending links to destination pages. We recommend a maximum of five outgoing links from each source page, adapting to your link block’s UI.
Select the maximum number of links to add to each destination page. These are the pages receiving links from the source pages. We recommend a maximum of 300 incoming links to each destination page.
If your project uses several URLs in the crawl settings instead of a clearly defined start URL, the "Select home pages" text box will display in this step to help SmartLink calculate page depth. Identify each page to be used as a starting point, one URL per line.
Reviewing the Optimization
After defining link rules, review the optimization settings and make any desired changes, or click Save to generate a preview file.
Optionally, click Download file to save and review the list of URLs to be optimized.
Generating the Links
Click Generate Links to start generating links. This may take up to one hour to complete.
When the links are generated, a report is displayed to help you evaluate the recommendations. The following are the metrics representing the results if you were to deploy the generated SmartLinks:
The total number of links to be added to source pages.
The number of destination pages to receive incoming links from source pages.
The number of source pages to send outgoing links to destination pages.
And charts comparing the following metrics with and without the SmartLink optimizations:
Number of inlinks
Page depth
PageRank
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